For 100 years, family found Fairmount a welcoming place to live

John Berry / The Post-StandardFrances Warren, 90, of Fairmount, holds a copy of a photograph of her sister, her brother and herself taken in 1929 that ran in the Syracuse Herald under a headline, “Show Courage in Face of Adversity.” It was a story about how the three children pitched in to help the family after their father. Back in those days, Maxine, 11, left, and Frances, 9, helped their brother Merrill, 13, on his paper route delivering the Syracuse Herald. “We always called it the homestead,” Bill Washington says.
Bill’s talking about the north end of Germania Avenue, in Fairmount, where his family has been settled close to 100 years. His grandfather, Frank Warren, built the original house in 1912.
The family also raised two other houses in the block, and a repair shop, Merrill Warren and Son, across the street. Bill remembers his Uncle Merrill, who died in 1992, starting to fix cars in the big garage out back.
This family history in unfolding in Frances Warren’s living room on Germania, a softball chuck from Milton Avenue. Frances, who was 90 years old last October, was born in the house – ‘’the doctor came here,” she explains – and has lived in the modest white home all of her life. Frances is retired a quarter of a century from General Electric at Electronics Park, a job she had 35 years.
“I never thought I’d live this long,” she says with a very large smile.
I’m there to hear about the time – was it really more than 80 years ago? – that Frances and her brother, Merrill, and sister, Maxine captured a piece of fame with a story in the newspaper, the Syracuse Herald, the very one the three children delivered around the neighborhood. The picture and story appeared Jan., 20, 1929. Frances holds the picture in her hands while my colleague, John Berry, takes her picture.
“That was really something,” she says. It was. The headline above the story read “Show Courage in Face of Adversity.”
It relates how Frank Warren’s three children – Merrill, 13, Maxine, 11, and Frances, 9 — pitched in to help the family after their father died two months before of tuberculosis.
“Not many children of today will trudge several miles a day delivering newspapers to earn money for the support and comfort of their family – and do it with a smile,” the Herald article began. It described Merrill, the oldest of the kids, as the “business manager of the family.” The route earned the Warrens $7 a week.
Frances talked about her brother’s paper route “all around here” the other day. The three picked up the newspapers at the Red and White grocery up on West Genesee Street every day after school. “Merrill would go one way, Maxine one way and me another,” she said. “We had it for four years.”
Sometimes Merrill made deliveries on his bicycle. Sometimes the children pulled the newspapers in a wagon. On Sunday, their father drove the route in his car “and then we came home and had breakfast.”
The youngsters collected from their customers and gave the money to their mother, Maude, who also took in washing, made bread and did sewing for her neighbors. “We didn’t think about keeping it for ourselves,” Frances said of her widowed mother who died in 1967 at 85. “She was feeding us and making our clothes.”
This is a photograph that ran in the Syracuse Herald on Jan. 20, 1929. From left are Maxine Warren, 11; her brother, Merrill Warren, 13 and their sister Frances Warren, 9. Back then, the Warren’s home was all by itself at the foot of Germania hill. The lot was surrounded by Jim Male’s farm, a spread that had a homestead on Genesee, where the Town of Camillus offices are today. Frances remembers her father having to go outside with a lantern to shoo one of “Jim Male’s cows” out of the Warren’s vegetable garden, which was large and surrounded the house. Germania was just a dirt path.
No special notice was made of a black family living among whites. “We were just one of ‘em,” Frances recalls. Bill, who is there with his sister, Shari Washington, says he didn’t have to deal with racial prejudice until he was 22 and a member of the Air Force in Texas. That was in the 1960s.
Despite her age, and arthritis, Frances says she still “takes in sewing” the way her sister, who died in 2008, and mother did. A package of formals hung on the kitchen door. In the past she’d done a lot of work for the West Genesee School District, including cheerleader uniforms and banners. Her brother Merrill was a president of Solvay-Geddes Lions Club.
Dick Case writes Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 470-2254, or by e-mail, dcase@syracuse.com.